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About Guardian Soft

Guardian Soft was founded on March 21, 1999 by Antonio Maiorano (Daroou) and Simon Robert (Hissssa). Many remember us from our first Internet site, the Daroou & Hissssa Homepage, which lasted for over two years, and initially covered console emulation and FTL's classic game, Dungeon Master. In January of 1998, we met Nathan Yam (Neutopia), founder of FiReBeLL, another non-profit game coding group who are well known for their remakes of the classics Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Under the tutelage of Nathan, we learned the art of creating games and thus spawned The Legend of Zelda PC, our remake of the ever-popular Nintendo original.

One of our missions at Guardian Soft is to create games that have that special look and feel of our favourite classics in hopes that we can maintain, and perhaps rekindle the feeling of nostalgia alive forever. Classic games have always had a special place in our hearts. As children, we would play games on the Nintendo and on the Atari ST, and wonder how such games were made. We always imagined what the sequels of certain games would be like, tried to guess what the names of the evil robots would be in the next Mega Man, and wondered whether Link and Zelda would ever actually settle down and get married! Often, we criticized games, believing that we could do a much better job if only we knew how. And so we decided to learn how. After reading a few programming books and fiddling around with graphics editing software, we are finally able to share our dreams with the rest of the world.

Antonio Maiorano

Born September 5th, 1979, I was just old enough to enjoy the coming of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the mid '80s. In fact, I became so obsessed with the NES that I spent practically most of my youth playing games! By the time I hit high school, I was also really into PC games, and my dreams of seeing my own names scrolling up in the credits continued to grow more and more.

My programming career really started when I was 17, but I guess it can be traced as far back as grade school, where I coded a script in Logo Writer that would draw and animate an entire city, while playing a cheesy tune throughout. By high school, I was playing around with QBASIC, making simple text-based RPGs. But like I said, my programming career became a reality when at the age of 17, I picked up and ravenously read through a book on Turbo Pascal. During the famous Montreal Ice Storm of '98, my friends and I were writing down the simple design of our very first game, Luthendar. When the power finally came back, I began to code Luthendar day and night, barely stopping to eat or sleep, and in no time, we had a pretty nice looking RPG on our hands!

By the time summer had come around, I had met Nathan Yam, founder of FiReBeLL and another young game programmer who had impressed me with his online demos. We started chatting on ICQ, and immediately became great friends, as Nathan took me under his wing and taught me the basics of game programming in C. With Simon doing graphics and with me programming, we were able to put together our first real-time graphical game, Zelda PC.

Since then, I have continued to learn new technologies, including Win32, DirectX, OpenGL, MFC, STL, and more. I have also continued to program games on the side, and in December 2001, graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelors of Computer Science. As part of the COOP program, I have also worked at some pretty amazing places, including Matrox and Softimage.

Having been taught so generously by Nathan Yam, I have always maintained that if you wish to learn more, you must be willing to teach others what you know. As a result, I have spent a lot of my time preparing tutorials and seminars to share my knowledge with the world.

In closing, I want to say that I am grateful to many people who have helped me have achieve so much in my life, including first, and foremost, my parents. Without them, I would never had had the opportunity to play so many games, and to spend so much time on the computer; their support has been endless! I also must thank my greatest friend, Simon Robert, for always being so patient and helping make our dreams come true! I thank Nathan Yam for teaching me so much, even though he had no idea who I was at the time. Of course, I cannot forget my beautiful lady, Nathalie, who has always supported my dreams. And finally, my friends and online buddies, Paul, Gerard, Ken, Jacob, Brad, and Jeff, who have always all been there to answer my questions and to rant with. I'm sure I have forgotten to list many others, but believe me, I haven't forgotten you in my head! Thanks everyone!

Simon Robert

Coming Soon!